


The Unemployable Leon Tao

by livenudebigfoot



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, Team Bonding, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-03-08 06:45:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 14,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18889282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livenudebigfoot/pseuds/livenudebigfoot
Summary: Team Machine needs a new tech guy. Leon Tao's not sure he fits the bill.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pielmones](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pielmones/gifts).



> This was written for pielmones' Sameen Shaw & Leon Tao prompt for Exchange of Interest! I had so much fun writing this (Leon's one of my favorites) and I really hope you like it!

As the water closes over his head again, he thinks to himself, “Leon, this might be a  _ you  _ problem.”

It’d be good if this kind of thing was out of character, right? It would be good if Leon was the kind of guy who could cry “Why me?” when a small-time dealer decided he needed to get beaten up and thrown off the side of an also-small yacht in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. But Leon knows exactly  _ why him _ \- it’s ‘cause of the money he stole - and this is actually the second time this has happened to him. Arguably third, if you count that time he talked his way out of the impromptu swimming part. He’d blame it on bad communication if it wasn’t a different guy every time. He heard somewhere once that if you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, well...

And that’s when his vision whites out.

Probably not for that long. Time gets all screwy when you’re in and out of consciousness, he knows, so it’s hard to be sure how long he’s been unconscious when he’s hauled to the surface by the collar of his shirt. 

Leon cough, sputters, blinks up into the mashed potato face of some henchman whose name he didn’t quite catch. 

“Where's the money, Tao?” he spits.

Leon coughs, seawater dribbling down his chin. “What, d’you think I just put it in a box? What part of ‘off-shore account’ are you not getting, you dip-”

And then the guy forces him down again.

_ Communications _ , Leon muses as he thrashes his legs,  _ have truly broken down _ .

It really is a  _ him  _ problem. Doesn’t take getting repeatedly thrown into the Atlantic Ocean to figure that one out. When he runs into an asshole, he can’t stop himself from saying, “Hey asshole, you’re an asshole.” Like when he went to pick up that pair of custom Banned Jordan 1s Ernesto was fixing up for him, but when he showed up Ernesto had his arm in a sling, and when Leon asked what happened Ernesto said there was a local dealer putting pressure on him to give a shitton of money in protection, so Leon thought, “That dealer sounds like an asshole and he deserves to have all his money stolen,” and now he’s drowning. 

_ If I had the whole self-control thing figured out _ , Leon thinks as he claws weakly at the guy’s wrist, as all the light he can see narrows to a single bright point,  _ maybe this kind of thing could be productive. _

And then he’s going up.

He’s too out of it, just that his ears are full of a horrible wheezing noise and he’s going up, over, and down onto a hard, flat surface, and whoever it is, they leave him there. The rest comes in bits and pieces. 

First, Leon realizes that he’s alive, which is a nice surprise. Then he figures out that the hard, flat surface he’s on is the bottom of the boat, and that it’s neither comfortable nor dry, but it’s better than the bottom of the ocean. Then he realizes that the horrible wheezing noise is actually him, trying to breathe, which is a shame. Gradually, he comes to realize that there are other noises: wet, cracking sounds and screams and once a gunshot that makes him curl up in a knot and put his hands over his ears. He’s curious about all that, sure, but he figures it’s probably best if he doesn’t see. Whoever’s causing the commotion didn’t let him drown, so that’s something. That matters. He closes his eyes until it all goes quiet.

He opens them again when someone pokes at him with the toe of their shoe.

“Hey,” they say. “You alive?”

Leon coughs once, wetly. 

“Good for you,” they say.

Leon turns his head, peers up into the face of a woman: small, dark, wiry. Familiar, but he’s too waterlogged to remember why.

They’re alone in the boat.

“Where’d everybody go?” he rasps.

She shrugs. “Don’t worry about it.”

So he doesn’t. He just lies there, hugging the deck and watching as she picks her way among dropped weapons and random sprays of blood, looking for something. After a while, she finds it: keys. 

“Our ticket out of here,” she says, both to Leon and not to Leon, like how you might talk to a slow wireless connection or a misbehaving cat. She picks up a discarded letterman jacket - pretty sure he saw it on one of the dealers earlier - from the floor of the boat.

Leon pushes himself up a little, immediately flops back down. “How’d you get out here?” he asks.

She drops the jacket over his shoulders with no particular care. “Mind your business.”

So he does. The boat starts up with a roar, and all that noise kinda kills conversation for a while. 

After a little bit, Leon finds he can sit up. He can see the shore now, a streak of bright lights on the horizon. It was never that far away, really. He arranges the jacket around his shoulders and decides immediately that he’s going to keep it. It’s cool in like an oversized _Big Trouble in Little China_ kinda way. He can get into that.

He focuses at last on his rescuer, her bloody boots, the muscles in her shoulders, her dark hair whipping in the wind. And he recognizes her at last.

“Didn’t I give you a ride once?” Leon rasps, throat raw with saltwater.

She thinks for a moment. “Oh. Yeah.” She chuckles darkly. “The ambulance.”

She bit him. That’s what he remembers most.

He pulls the jacket tighter around himself, listens to the grunts and whimpers of pain coming from the hold, lets the wind dry his hair.

 

* * *

 

“No, but…” he mumbles around a mouthful of jerk chicken wrap, “for real, thank you.”

Beside him on the park bench, Shaw’s lost in thought, wiping jerk sauce from her fingertips with a wad of napkins. Her wrap is already demolished, somehow. Jury’s out on this woman being a werewolf, but like,  _ maybe _ . “Not that every human life isn’t a precious flower or whatever,” she says, “but I didn’t just save you out of the goodness of my heart.”

“Well, yeah.” Leon clears his throat. “So you, uh, you’re working with John and Finch now?”

She doesn’t turn to look at him. “Kind of.” 

“How is John? He good? I haven’t seen him in...probably more than five years.”

Her face doesn’t change, her voice doesn’t change, when she says, “He’s gone.”

Leon’s heart dips. “Like...like  _ dead  _ gone? Or…?”

She shakes her head slowly. “We never found out. Just gone.”

“Wow,” he says. “Wow, that’s awful. He was a really, really special guy. Can I, uh...what happened?”

She doesn’t answer. He guesses it’s a difficult question.

“Is, um, is Finch...?”

“Gone too.” She twists the napkin between her fingers, tight.

Leon swallows hard. “Wow. Who’s left?”

With what sounds like effort, she says, “That’s kind of why I’m here. You in the market for a job?”

Leon’s not the kind of guy who has a job anymore. He used to be. He did all of it, went to the networking events and shook hands with old guys who also went to NYU and went to dehumanizing, time-sucking interviews and put on boring-ass suits to go sit in a boring-ass cubicle and lose years of his life chasing down other people’s money.

And then he got laid off. And then his next job turned out to be for the corporate arm of the Aryan Nation. The last day Leon worked a desk job, he only showed up long enough to do some mild-to-moderate embezzling and steal some snacks from the breakroom.

So yeah, Leon doesn’t exactly have a job right now. His job, if he had a job, is locked up in the hold of that speedboat, and that’s kinda over with, the money nestled away offshore, accruing a little and getting fat so he can skim a little off the top before he funnels the rest to Ernesto. Nothing left to do but wait. So yeah, he’s out of work, in a sense.

Leon leans forward on the bench, staring off in a rough approximation of her disinterested stare. He lets his voice go soft, dark, like it might if you were a very cool spy who’s going to totally kick ass at negotiations. “If Finch is gone, you’re gonna need somebody new to be the brains.”

Shaw lets out this big, nasty bark of laughter that makes him jump.

Leon guesses he should’ve known better, but he can’t think what else she would want him for. “...The muscle?”

She wipes her mouth. “This is already a nightmare,” she says to no one. She swivels to face him on the bench. “I need somebody who knows their way around a computer. Somebody who can hack, who can research. Get us paydirt on our Numbers.” 

“That’s the brains.”

“That’s dispatch,” she corrects. “I can get you a decent paycheck - not great money, but more than enough to live on - and a place to stay if you need it. You interested?”

Is he? He remembers the last time he saw John, outside that casino in Atlantic City. He’d said that he wanted to do what they did. Help people. Was he talking out of his ass? A little bit. Saving people is hard work and he’s not geared for it. He’s not John. He’s smart and he’s willing, but the second someone sticks a gun in his face, his spine turns to Jell-o. Still, it felt good to help that cool old guy take on that scuzzy casino, same way it does when he thinks of the money he’s planning to discreetly slip Ernesto’s way. 

It feels right, to make your own life hard so someone else's doesn't have to be. 

Leon takes a slow, deliberate swig of his bottle of pineapple soda. "I'll sleep on it."

That night in his apartment, he doesn’t sleep. He paces, nerves at an all-time high. This happens sometimes, when people almost kill him. He’s pretty OK in the moment. It’s only hours later that his heart starts hammering, his fingers start shaking. But it’s not the water closing over his head that freaks him out; it’s the pattern he can feel falling into. Like the years he spent in the cubicle, chasing down billions he’ll never get to touch. It’s a new infinity, one where he finds a new scheme every couple of months and he pushes it too far and the situation turns on him and suddenly somebody wants him dead again and it keeps happening, over and over, until finally someone does kill him, and he never gets to feel like he did outside that casino in Atlantic City, not ever.

Leon decides he doesn’t need to sleep on this choice.


	2. Chapter 2

There was an elevator before. Leon remembers. They put a bag over his head, but he would never have forgotten all these goddamn stairs. But the elevator is out, it seems, and the heat and all the lights too. He and Shaw climb the stairwell in thick, grimy darkness, broken only by the light of their phones. The steps are coated in a layer of dust and dirt, occasionally marked with telltale bootprints.

“Why’s this place such a dump now?” Leon asks, trying to disguise how out of breath he is.

“We got raided by the cops,” Shaw answers from ahead of him in the dark. She doesn’t sound out of breath at all. “Right around the time Samaritan came online. So we had to move our operation somewhere else.”

“Oh, OK.” He tries to push his breathing down, so it’s only a tiny rasp in the dark. So he’s not wheezing, like he wants to be. “And Samaritan is…?”

Her voice is careful, ominous in the dark. “Doesn’t matter. It’s gone now.”

She pushes open the door to their floor and light trickles weakly into the stairwell. She waits for Leon to take the last eight or nine steps, and if she’s judging him on how out of shape he is, she doesn’t say so. But she’s thinking it, he’s pretty sure.

Even in the dark, these are more familiar surroundings. Leon recognizes the hallway he’s standing in, the big metal gate. On the other side, the light’s a little brighter, there’s the faint sound of AC/DC blaring from somebody’s tinny phone speaker, and there’s a dog snuffling at the skinny gap in the door.

_ Finally _ , Leon thinks,  _ a friendly face _ . “Hey, Bear.”

Bear wags his entire body.

“You guys know each other, huh?” Shaw asks. She lets out a disgusted little sigh at the padlock and chain dangling unlocked from the gate. The metal squeals, protests as she pushes it open.

“Yeah.” Leon crouches down, holds out one hand. “We got along.”

He catches Bear’s full weight right on his chest, gets a faceful of dog kisses for his trouble. So today’s looking up already. 

“Lionel,” he hears Shaw calling out, “you gotta lock the door.”

The AC/DC comes to an abrupt end. “You remember to bring your keys?” answers a voice from deeper in the library.

“No,” Shaw admits, sheepishly. 

“Well, there you go.” 

When Leon sits up, Bear’s wiggly dog body half in his lap, he recognizes Fusco pretty much right away. It’s been a long time, and Fusco’s maybe a little grayer, a little more tired than he was the last time Leon saw him, but once you’ve been handcuffed to somebody, it’s hard to forget their face.

He’s dressed in jeans and a thick sweatshirt, as coated in dust as everything else around him.

“You look like shit,” Shaw says, pleasantly.

Fusco jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “Back there looks like shit. You won’t believe how much I got done.” His gaze drops to Leon on the floor. “So you’re in, huh?”

Leon gently pushes Bear off his lap. “Seems like it, yeah.”

“OK.” Fusco’s studying him a little, sizing him up or something. He jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “There’s a broom back there if you wanna start sweeping.”

Leon turns to Shaw. “This is the kind of work you called me up here for?” He scrambles to his feet. “Listen, I know I’m the new kid around here, but this is not what I was hired for. I’m a forensic accountant, I’m actually  _ pretty good _ at what I do, and I’m not gonna be your janitor to prove myself to you or what _ ever _ …”

“We didn’t ask you here to play janitor,” Fusco interrupts. “You’re here ‘cause you know computers and you can chase paper trails. But right now, we can’t do any of the stuff we want you to do because there’s no power and there’s broken glass all over the place. So calm down and pick up a broom.”

Kinda hard to argue with that. 

And he’s not wrong, which is annoying. It’s bad in the library. Shattered glass all over everything, shelves knocked over, chunks - straight-up  _ chunks  _ \- of books lying scattered on the floor. If Leon looks closely, he can see how it must’ve been even worse before. There’s full trash bags lined up against the wall, busted pieces of furniture piled to one side, broken windows hastily patched over with wood. Bad as it looks, they’ve been working hard.

“Can’t wait to get all that crap out of here,” Fusco says, following Leon’s eyeline. “I’ve been doing it in bits and pieces, but it’s slow going on the stairs, Once we get this place up and running…”

“The elevator?”

“Yeah.” Fusco taps his phone and AC/DC starts blaring again. “For now, we’re just picking up.”

A few hours later, the floor in the immediate area is clean enough that you could probably walk around barefoot. Fusco and Shaw have pushed most of the bookshelves upright again. And Leon has successfully negotiated the AC/DC into Queen, so things are seriously looking up. The three of them sit cross-legged on the dusty floor, munching on energy bars and silently appreciating their work.

“You know,” Leon says after a while, head craned back to take in an overhead light draped in thick cobwebs, “this is actually a really cool place. I’m kind of excited to work here.”

“Yeah,” Fusco says softly. “Feels right. This was their old HQ, you know.”

“I know,” Leon says. “I’ve been here before.”

“Oh. You’ve been here before.” Fusco sighs deeply. “You hear that, Sameen? He’s been here before. That’s interesting. That’s real goddamn interesting. How about that. I...”

“Lionel,” Shaw says, firmly. “Not now.”

He snaps, “How many times did they meet this guy? A grand total of twice?” He turns back to Leon. “No offence.”

“More like four times. But none taken.”

“That wasn’t up to me,” Shaw says. “If it was, you would have gotten a chance to see the place before the cops trashed it.”

Fusco snorts gently. “We weren’t all that close before the cops trashed it.”

Shaw falls silent, chews that one over. “I kinda thought we were.”

Fusco exhales softly, pats the upper sole of her steel-toed boot as a kind of apology or concession.

_ Baggage _ , Leon thinks to himself as he takes another bite of energy bar.  _ You get it in every new workplace. _

 

* * *

 

The place doesn’t come together all at once. It’s a bit-by-bit thing. They’re all busy, Leon guesses. Fusco’s still a cop and he has a kid to take care of, Shaw still does whatever Shaw does and Leon, well, Leon’s between jobs, which is busy in its own way. They come in when they can.

And it’s nice to see how the library is cleaner every time. It’s nice to come in and find Fusco up on a ladder, diligently reshelving books, or Shaw glancing between an electrician’s handbook and some nasty-looking wiring, her forehead creased. One day, Leon’s putting a standing desk together by flashlight when Shaw comes in and flicks the light switch and, like magic, it’s bright in the library.

It’s not like it was. Not so grand, not so mysterious. But it’s good enough. It’s what they need it to be for right now. It’s theirs, for whatever that’s worth.


	3. Chapter 3

Leon has a lot of plates in the air. 

He’s always been like that. He’s not a person who can do just one thing: he needs the second task to fill in the gaps of the first, he needs coffee to keep himself awake, he needs the reward to keep himself motivated, he needs his leg jiggling, twitching in place, just to have something to do.

Finch wasn’t like that, he guesses.

“ _ Leon _ ,” Shaw snaps at him through the headset. “I need an assist  _ now _ .”

“I gotcha,” Leon murmurs. “I gotcha. Left down the alley. Then up the fire escape.”

Shaw groans miserably into the mic.

It’s not like he’s not riveted by Shaw tearing the East Village apart while in hot pursuit of an ex-IRA weapons dealer. Based on the noises he’s hearing over the headset, it sounds pretty exciting. It’s just that, you know, he’s not there. And he’s already traced the guy’s phone, which is something he’s totally getting the hang of. And he’s mapping out Shaw’s route, which is kinda complicated, because she’s on foot and the guy's in a car and Leon’s creative. But he also has a grand design in mind, so that’s making everything a little bit simpler. And he’s also researching the guy’s personal life, ostensibly to see if he can uncover any useful information but mostly because being nosy is fun.  _ And  _ he’s kind of in a bidding war over a Balmain moto jacket that was discontinued back in 2015, which isn’t really relevant but  _ is  _ time sensitive, so.

Point is, it’s not like he’s not paying attention. 

“ _ Leon! _ ” He can hear the clang of Shaw’s boots on the fire escape ladder.

“I’m with you.” Leon peers closely at his map, his time tables. They’re cutting it short. She’s gonna have to pick up the pace. “Northeast corner of the building.”

Shaw answers frothy, out-of-breath snarl. Better her than him, though. Leon was never much of a runner. It’s a little like playing a video game, albeit one with clunky-ass controls. Mirror’s Edge, maybe. Speaking of which…

“You’re gonna want to keep running, and when you get to the corner, jump.”

“ _ Leon _ ,” she murmurs, dangerously soft.

“What? The next roof’s not that far away. Just tuck and roll. You can do it, right?”

“Just tuck and roll,” she repeats, under her breath. “I mean, yeah.”

There’s the thud of her boots, a sudden intake of breath, a moment of perfect silence. And then just rustling, the whistling of the wind.

On Leon’s screen, the tiny dot that represents Shaw moves about a half inch.

He bets it looks dope. 

In his ears, a thud and a scrape and Leon’s about to ask, “Hey, you dead?” when she interrupts him: “Pick up the pace. What’s next?”

He’s lost his place on the map, has to scramble for a second. “Door. Door on the roof. I got a code…”

An ear-splitting crash.

“...Or you can knock it down.”

“No time.”

“It’s like five digits. Enjoy your shoulder pain.”

“All the way down to the first floor?” she asks. Leon expects the patter of footsteps, but it’s a loud thud every few seconds, like she’s jumping from level to level. 

“Second floor.”

“Got it.” Thud. “After that?”

“Exit the stairwell, turn left…”

The squeak of hinges. “And?”

“You see a window at the end of the hall?”

“Am I going out it?”

“Yup.”

Footsteps, hard breathing and, abruptly, the sound of broken glass.

“...Or you could like...open it.”

A loud crash. And then, “Really, Leon? A dumpster?”

“Yeah, you needed a place to land. Could you not just open the window with your hands? That’s not hard.”

“Next?”

Leon peers at his phone tracking information. They’re cutting it close, super-fine. “OK, OK, OK. You have 30 seconds. Get out of the dumpster, hang a right down the alleyway, and he’ll be coming right at you, headed north.”

“This route is so stupid.”

“27 seconds.”

He can hear the tinkling of glass shards, the clank of Shaw trying to finagle her way out of the dumpster. “I got it,” she grumbles almost to herself as she hits the ground running, “I got it.”

The tiny dot that is Shaw inches out of the alleyway and into the street, into the path of the much faster dot that is their number.

“Silver Audi?” Shaw asks.

“Yup.”

“This guy drives like a dick,” Shaw remarks. “Got any plans for making him stop?”

“Kinda thought I’d leave that to you, bud.”

She sighs deeply. “Yeah, I guess I’m the expert.”

And then it’s just gunshots. That’s what a Shaw solution sounds like.

 

* * *

 

“I coulda caught him three blocks ago,” Shaw says. She sounds like she has her wind back. But then, she hasn’t started running from the cops yet, and she’s going to have to soon. 

“Yeah,” Leon admits. “But if you caught him three blocks ago, then you wouldn’t be around the block from where Korilla’s about to be in…” He checks the time. “Five minutes.”

Shaw takes a deep, thoughtful breath. Fake casual, she asks, “And Korilla is...?”

“Food truck,” Leon says. “Picture this: Korean barbeque pork. Kimchi bacon fried rice. On a burrito.”

She makes a considering sound, like a big cat trying to decide whether you’re worth the effort of killing and eating.

Leon whispers into his headset: “I’ll give you a much less stupid escape route and I swear you will not be sorry.”

“Where am I going next?”

She escapes the cops. She catches the food truck. She orders two burritos. She eats both of them. Leon guesses he’s not allowed to complain.

 

* * *

 

“What do you think of him?” Fusco asks.

The two of them are in Manhattan, in a coffee shop not all that far away from Fusco’s precinct, and Fusco’s casually sliding Shaw a manila envelope of information pertaining to their latest number. Fusco doesn’t specify who “him” is, but Leon knows when he’s being talked about.

“He’s not my hire, Lionel. You know that.”

“I know that,” Fusco repeats. “But what do you think of him?”

“He can do the job,” she says. “Eventually. You know him better than I do.”

Fusco snorts. “I only met him twice before this. But I know what you mean, he’s smart enough and I think he’s, you know, he’s got his heart in the right place and everything; he’s just…”

“A flake.”

“...Yeah.”

“It’s a game to him so far. None of it’s real yet.”

“Right.” Fusco sips at his coffee. “Will be soon, though. Whether that means he gets serious or quits on the spot is a whole other thing, but. I mean, if I can get my shit together, anybody can. Give him time, you know?”

“Who says you have your shit together?”

Leon thinks Fusco kicks her under the table.


	4. Chapter 4

Leon hasn’t been a forensic accountant for a really long time, but he still has that kind of brain. The kind that follows money.

He’s not sure where their money comes from. They don’t seem to work for anybody in particular. They’re not government, and they’re for sure not corporate. They’re just a tiny faction of three - four if you count Bear - and there’s nobody they call boss. But there must be someone. Shaw’s not coming up with those social security numbers on her own and Shaw’s a lot of things but independently wealthy isn’t one of them. Yet, it’s there at the end of the month, and every month after that: money from nowhere, more than he needs to live on.

And he is not Shaw’s hire, whatever that means.

Leon’s forensic brain can be applied in other ways. Like to personal stuff. There’s more to work with there. The payday evidence was erased by a hand so deft he hasn’t seen anything like it since that hacker, the artist, on the first case John brought him on. The personal wreckage on this team isn’t hidden, it’s just swept off to the side like the debris in the Library.

Shaw’s the toughest nut to crack, so she’s the one who Leon spends the most time thinking about. He didn’t know Shaw before. He’s got no basis for comparison. But he can tell she’s used to being on her own, or being one of the group. Being the boss, having people looking to her for guidance, is a new thing and she’s uneasy with it. Not afraid, just uncomfortable. Just a faint flicker of surprise when Fusco asks her permission for anything.

Leon knew Fusco barely, knew that he was prickly and stubborn and that he does illegal and dangerous things with the grim, everyday determination of a guy clocking in for his shift. He’s still like that. It’s interesting, not new. There’s a bitterness there that seems to fit with everything else, a “Why am I always the last to know?” kind of anger over whatever happened before Leon got here. He moves slow and careful a lot of the time, refers off-hand to non-specific injuries. He’s odd around Leon sometimes, still prickly but thoughtful. Like before, it was just him and Shaw working together in a comfortable partnership, but now Leon’s here and it’s a hierarchy, and Fusco’s second-in-command (third-in-command if you count Bear) and he’s never been that high up in anything and he’s not sure how far to push that, if he has any right to.

Just two uncomfortable people, wearing shoes they’re pretty sure are too big for them.

Bear’s not uncomfortable. He’s just a little depressed, maybe.

The forensics on Bear are easier to run. Bear is Shaw’s dog. That’s not in question. Fusco seems to like Bear enough - he’ll take him home on a weekend when Shaw can’t or let his hand run absently along Bear’s back as he passes by Fusco’s chair - but that might be tolerance more than anything else. The same as what he has for Leon. Shaw’s the one who feeds Bear, who brings him home at night, who spontaneously brings him treats and toys with a warmth and excitement that seems slightly wrong on her. In the same way a Hawaiian shirt or a tutu would seem wrong on her.

And Bear seems happy when he’s with Shaw. He leaps to his feet and runs to greet her when she comes back from a mission, bounds excitedly along at her side when she decides to bring him along. When she comes into the Library in the mornings, hair tied back, shining with sweat from her run, Bear slinks in after her and flops onto his bed, panting happily, tail thumping the floor.

It’s when she leaves that Bear seems to get sad. She tries not to leave him behind at all. There’s a lot of ways Bear can help Shaw and  _ besides _ , she’ll say,  _ he needs the exercise _ . But there are places you can’t bring a dog, if you’re a spy or whatever Shaw is, and you don’t want to attract that attention. Sometimes she’s undercover or on stakeout all night, and Bear’s well-trained, but not that well-trained. So Shaw leaves Bear in the Library with Leon a lot. It’ll be fine at first - Bear and Leon get along pretty well - but after a bit he starts to get sullen, still. He’ll lie under Leon’s desk with his head resting on his paws, eyes soft and brown and imploring.

And Leon will think about how Bear wasn’t always Shaw’s dog. That John was the one who adopted him and Finch was the one who had Bear’s bed right beside his desk, the one who was so fussy about his diet. 

And there would have been other people too, people Leon never knew about. The woman Shaw and Fusco speak about in hushed tones sometimes: Root, he thinks. Bear was never just Shaw’s dog before now. This was a team effort.

So sometimes Leon pretends Bear is his dog.

Not super hard to do, to be honest. You can only be locked in an empty library with a bored, sad dog for like...thirty minutes? Before you feel like you have to scratch his ears and play fetch with him or else be jailed for your crimes. Leon’s managed to stay out of jail so far. He’d like to keep it that way. And it’s kinda nice. Leon never had a dog before.

So he pets Bear. A lot. He buys him bougie treats that kinda-unhinged-but-otherwise-very-nice dog owners recommend in private Facebook groups. He brushes Bear on the reg, because summer in NYC is hot and Bear’s stuck wearing a coat all the time. Leon had this idea he’d try running with Bear - Get in shape and enrich the dog’s life! Two birds, one stone! - except that lasted all of ten minutes before Leon skidded, wheezing, to a stop and used Google to locate the nearest dog park, which is more his speed. That actually worked out pretty well, because Bear got to hang out with other dogs and dogs are actually a pretty good conversation starter, so now Leon has a bunch of casual acquaintances who have never been involved in organized crime, which is pretty neat. He’d probably spend all his time at the dog park, if he didn’t need to be at his desk occasionally.

Leon plays fetch. A lot. Which is fine; he'll throw a tennis ball down a library hallway for Bear. He’s not a monster. Except sometimes he's racing against the clock to erase some security footage or trace a phone and there's Bear at his elbow, pressing a soggy, threadbare tennis ball into his lap. And it's hard to explain to Bear that it's not a great time for fetch, because dogs think every time is a great time for fetch. And before, there was always someone.

“What the hell’s with all the tennis balls?” Shaw calls from further down the hall.

“Oh, yeah.” Leon finishes stealing the file he was after and steps back from his desk, stretching out his wrist. “Sorry about that. Didn’t have a chance to reload.”

He steps out into the hallway to find Shaw wading through an ankle-deep sea of brand-new, neon green tennis balls. Bear prances excitable circles around her. “Reload?” she asks, eyebrow raised.

“Uh huh.” Leon jerks his thumb over his shoulder, towards the tennis ball throwing machine he wrestled into the elevator the night before and spent the morning setting up. “I had stuff to do, but Bear was bored, so.”

Shaw fixes him with a deep, quizzical stare.

“It’s, uh.” Leon pushes his hands into his pockets. “It’s called the Lobster.”

She folds her arms, head tilted.

“Like, uh, like it throws. Lobs. Thought that was...funny.”

He’s getting nothing from Shaw.

“Anyway. Better clean this up.” Leon starts to pick up tennis balls, as many as he can fit in each hand (which isn’t a lot) and toss them back towards the machine. Some of them even make it in.

Wordlessly, Shaw joins him.


	5. Chapter 5

Fusco manages to stay stoic for almost ten minutes before he snaps and says that of course empanadas are the best stakeout food, no question, end of conversation, and that's when Leon knows he has him.

Fusco was kind of a grouchy son of a bitch the first time Leon met him. And almost every time after that. So Leon doesn't hold that against him, really. Just kinda seems like his natural state. The cold shoulder, though, that's new. Whatever else he is, Fusco’s a steady, sociable guy. A guy who feeds on the push and pull of a good, pointless argument. Not so much these days.

He’s acting like Shaw, a little bit. Except Leon’s pretty sure that Shaw’s cold shoulder isn’t a put-on; it’s just how she is. She’s not equipped for friendliness and chit-chat and she doesn’t try to fake it. Fusco, on the other hand, needs human interaction like most people need oxygen. Which means he either really doesn’t care for Leon (totally possible), or he’s trying not to get too attached. If you made Leon guess - and nobody’s making him guess, but - Leon would say Fusco’s trying to not get attached.

And, he reflects as he bugs the office he just broke into, this would be the kind of situation where getting attached would be a handicap. Because actually? This is kind of dangerous.

Here’s their situation: Leon’s holed up in the corner office that’s usually occupied by Shannon Gaines, who’s a day trader at a mid-size financial firm. Shaw called Leon up a couple of hours ago and said that Gaines was going to either do a bad thing or have a bad thing done to her, which is an annoying and vague thing that Shaw does sometimes. Gaines quickly proved to have better-than-usual digital hygiene, so they had to go kind of old school with it. That’s why Leon’s here, bugging her phone and hiding a tiny camera in a potted spider plant and copying her entire hard drive onto an iron key. And Fusco’s waiting outside in the car. Getaway driver, Fusco claims. Supervisor, Leon suspects.

“Can you put some music on, at least?” Leon whispers as he rescrews the plastic backing on their number’s newly-bugged desk phone . “I can’t really play any music ‘cause I’m...breaking and entering, but if you put something on in the car, I’ll be able to hear it through the earpiece.”

Fusco answers, “No music on stakeouts.”

Leon sets his screwdriver down on the desk. “At all?”

“Keep your voice down. There’s security on duty,” Fusco says. And then, “Yeah, it’s distracting.”

“What do you do for 10 hours?”

“Not a lot,” Fusco answers in the grim whisper of a man who has lost full weeks of his life to sitting silently in a car. “You talk, if the other person’s any good to talk to.”

Leon blows right past the barely veiled insult. “Can you put on podcasts, at least? That’s quieter.”

“What the hell’s a podcast?”

 _Oh my god._ “Long story, but it’s kinda...radio, but on the internet.”

“No thanks.”

“You’d like them. You would like at least one. There’s one for everything.” Even whatever boring old white guy thing you’re into. Baseball? Probably.

“I’ll sit this one out.”

“OK, but _I_ didn’t agree to sit this one out, so...”

And then he hears a door close.

Somebody’s in the office.

Leon grabs his screwdriver and slides off the chair and under the desk. It’s one of those very chill, very modern glass desks, so it’s not hiding him even a little bit. He lays on his belly, tries to look uninteresting.

After a couple seconds, Leon realizes that definitely will not fly. He snatches the iron key out of the USB port it’s plugged into and shoves it in his back pocket. He hops to his feet, throws himself into a shadow, and curses offices with glass walls, like, as a concept, as the beam of a flashlight sweeps over quiet, empty cubicles.

“Somebody’s here,” Leon whispers, so soft that he can barely hear himself speak.

Fusco seems to hear him just fine, though. “Who?” His voice is also hushed.

“Security, I think.”

“Can you get out of it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” Leon takes a deep breath. “There’s nowhere to really hide.”

“Can you talk your way out?”

Can he? Sure, he can talk. He can think fast. He’s not 100% dressed like a burglar, although he is wearing dark jeans and a black hoodie, so kinda. But the jeans and the hoodie are both nice enough that they could translate to well-dressed nerd, and Leon’s been one of those his whole life. So maybe. If he has to.

As if on cue, the beam of the flashlight swings through the glass wall of the office and suddenly he _has_ to. Leon steps away from the wall and into the light, hand up, face squinting but friendly. “Hey man, what’s going on?” he asks, and his voice doesn’t quaver even a little bit.

The guy holding the flashlight is a tall, burly silhouette. Voice muffled by the glass, he says, “Sir, step away from the door.”

Leon backs away. “No problem. Are you, uh, security?”

He pushes the door open. “I am. And you are…?”

“IT.” Leon points at the desktop computer, like it proves something. “I was running some diagnostics on the system and we got a really troubling report back from this machine.”

Security guy turns his flashlight off so Leon can finally get a look at him. White guy. Buzzcut. Frowning. Big, but Leon already knew that. “IT?”

“Uh huh.”

“Don’t think I’ve seen you around before.”

“No, I don’t usually leave the first floor.” Which is where the IT offices are. Guess who did his research? He’s doing great. This is cinema verite. “I’m a specialist.”

“Uh huh. Can I get your name, for my report?”

“Yeah, sure. Jason Bao.” Bullshit name, but what does Leon care? By the time this guy gets eyes on his report, Leon will be long gone.

He kind of expects the guy to write that down, make a note on his phone, something, but he doesn’t. Just fixes Leon with a cold, hard stare. “And you fixed that issue with Miss Gaines’ computer?”

 _Miss Gaines_. Interesting. “No, actually. I couldn’t find it. Think the problem might’ve been been on our end. I’m gonna go back down and check it out, though.” Leon moves to slide past him.

The guy blocks his path. “Yeah, you’re gonna need to stay here.”

Leon’s heart leaps to his throat. “Are you sure? ‘Cause I can’t fix the problem from up here.”

And then it's the weirdest thing in the world, because this security guard shifts from standing there being kind of a hardass security guard to drawing a gun and sticking it in Leon’s face so smoothly, like it's nothing. His face doesn't even change. “Who are you," the guard asks, "really?”

The inside of Leon’s head fills up with something like the scream of a thousand badly-tuned violins, but underneath the orchestrations there’s a tiny voice that whispers, _This doesn’t seem like the kind of place that would give its security guards guns_.

The voice has a point. “I...I told you,” Leon stammers, throat scratchy. “My name is Jason Bao. I work in…”

“Nobody here by that name,” the security guard says softly. “What are you, an investigator? Did the company hire you? Who else knows what you know?”

“I don’t know anything. I’m…” He scrambles desperately. “I’m new.”

“Please.” The security guy shakes his head. “This is getting embarrassing. Turn around, face the wall.”

And he does. He doesn’t know what else to do; the talking isn't working and John’s not around to save him. He braces his trembling hands against the wall. “You can’t shoot me,” Leon whispers. “People know I’m here.”

“You broke in," the guy says like it's no big deal. "We’ll figure something out.”

His heart thudding, all his chances slipping away, with nothing but an open phone line to defend himself, Leon says out loud, in the squeakiest, least cool voice possible, “Lionel, I don’t know what’s going on, but the security guard’s in on it.”

In his ear, but also from the doorway, Fusco answers, “I know, kid.”

The gunshot makes him jump.

He doesn’t turn around, doesn't even move a muscle until Fusco grabs him by the shoulder. "Hey. You all in one piece?” Fusco asks. His forehead is even more creased than usual.

Leon nods.

“You got everything? All you needed?”

He nods again, trusts his voice just enough to ask, “How’d you get here so fast?”

Fusco shrugs sheepishly. “I waited a few minutes until I was sure you were in and came in after you. It’s your first rodeo; I wasn’t gonna let you go in here alone.”

Leon's just nodding again, speechless.

“Listen, I gotta mop all this up,” Fusco says, gesturing to the security guard like he's a problem that can be solved with a mop. “I'm gonna call the cops, if nobody's called them already. Don't have a great reason for being here, but...I'll see what I can come up with. You can’t be here while that's happening. You’re your own ride home, understand?”

“Uh huh.”

Fusco slaps him hard on the shoulder. “Go.”

Leon scrambles out of the office and into the night.

 

* * *

 

“So I almost died tonight,” Leon whispers into his phone. He doesn’t need to; the rattle of the train covers him pretty well.

Shaw, sounding very unimpressed: “That can’t be new for you.”

“I mean it’s not. But. I dunno. What do I do next? I never had anything to do next. I just…” His hand is shaking. He holds tight to the pole.

“Just gotta think about the Number. Do we know why we’re looking at them? Do we have that situation on lock?”

“No! No. We don’t know anything. I feel like I know less than I knew before I broke into that office. And Fusco just shot a guy but we don’t actually know why that guy needed shooting in the first place and he can’t explain it to the other cops by saying he was just trying to protect me, because we’re saying I wasn’t there, so…” Leon folds in half, curls in on himself.

“Sounds like you know what you need to do.”

“Yeah,” Leon groans. “Yeah, OK.”

He takes his laptop out of his bag, takes the iron key with all of Shannon Gaines’ files on it out of his pocket, and starts searching. And wow, does he find stuff. He’s seeing embezzlement on a massive scale, he’s seeing a _nasty_ affair with the security guard, he’s seeing concerns about at least one coworker catching on to the embezzlement, and he’s seeing preliminary conversations about hiring someone to take care of the suspicious coworker.

Leon picks out a few key files and sends them on to Fusco, makes a few anonymous tips to a few other, different departments so it’ll look more like a group effort. Fusco responds with a terse “thank u” and nothing else, so things must be going _great_.

Leon can’t really sleep that night, so he paces around the Library, playing music and drinking wine and making unwise purchases on the Internet and generally doing anything he can to avoid thinking about how close he came to dying tonight.

Somewhere around the third glass of wine, Leon remotely accesses Fusco’s phone, just for the hell of it.

 

* * *

 

“So,” Fusco says as he sets a little to-go tray of coffees on Leon’s desk. “You doin’ OK?”

“Oh, yeah," Leon answers, spinning breezily in his chair. "I get held at gunpoint all the time.”

Fusco cracks a tiny smile as he leans there. He looks really tired, like he probably slept about as much as Leon did. Maybe less. “Just wanted to, uh, say thanks for your backup last night. With the files. Made everything go a lot smoother. I wasn’t really sure what I was gonna say.”

“No problem. Least I could do.”

“They’re in custody, by the way. Both of them.”

“Oh. Good. Good.”

It is good. Screw those people. Leon feels sleepy, delirious, satisfied warmth radiate from his center.

Fusco taps his phone gently on the desk. “So I can’t help but notice that there’s a new thing on my phone. As of about three this morning.”

“Oh, yeah?” Leon tries to sound innocent as he sips his coffee.

“Yeah, this app. Looks like it’s called Overcast.”

“Oh?”

“I mean I’m not complaining. I haven’t slept and I did a lot of paperwork last night. It was good to have stuff to listen to. Kept me awake and all that. But I didn’t download any of it, you know?”

“Weird, man.”

“Look, will you cut the shit and show me how to download more?”


	6. Chapter 6

It turned so bad so fast.

Things were fine! Things were fine for a while. That’s what Leon keeps thinking to himself, over and over. Silently, ‘cause he knows Shaw wouldn’t appreciate it.

Leon really only knows the Cliff’s Notes for this one. Albanian mob is one piece. A scared teenager ferrying a duffle bag full of coke is another. It’s not that hard to put the pieces together. Fusco’s on dad duty, taking the teenage mule someplace safe. Shaw’s on mob duty, making sure they don’t cause the kid any trouble. Leon’s supposed to be on sidekick duty, helping Shaw beat a tough security system. And he did it right! He’s sure he did it right! It’s just that something must have gone wrong anyway because Shaw staggers out bleeding from the shoulder and a bullet whizzes out of a window and nearly hits Leon where he's standing out on the sidewalk and now they have to _run_.

Shaw drapes her good arm over his shoulders, lets her bleeding one hang. Leon has to run for the both of them. Luckily, Shaw’s awake enough to give directions.

Leon was kind of hoping her directions would take them to a hospital or a mob doctor or a shady vet or something. Instead, they take them to a warehouse, to a basement, to a locked door that Leon has to kick down, and finally to a set of concrete stairs that empty out into an empty, dirty subway platform. A single subway car waits on the tracks, doors ajar.

“It’s abandoned,” Shaw pants. “The car doesn’t work anymore.”

Leon figured not. The subway car is riddled with bullet holes. It’s also, bizarrely, outfitted like an office and filled with what look like old Playstations.

Shaw’s staring at it too, eyes dark and flat. “I can’t believe it’s still here.” She clears her throat. “We gotta get on the tracks.”

“Is that, uh, safe?”

“Nobody uses this stretch of track. We just gotta walk to the next station.” Shaw tilts her head towards the empty maw of the tunnel. “Help me get down?”

So the upside - because upsides are thin on the ground today and he has to appreciate them when he finds them - is that Leon gets to live out his lifelong weird impulse to climb down the ladder onto the subway tracks and do...something. Never sure what he wanted to actually do while he was down there. Just wanted to check out that ladder.

Anyway, the downside is that now he has to catch his surprisingly heavy friend when she slips from the ladder and falls back onto him. He staggers, but it’s an OK catch, all things considered. He lifts her, slings her good arm across his shoulders again. “You OK?” Leon asks.

“Good enough,” Shaw grits.

They begin walking down the dark, dirty track.

“Stay off the third rail,” she says, suddenly. “You know that, right?”

“Yeah, I think I heard something about that.”

She’s not worried. He can’t tell if that’s because it’s not a big deal or because it’s Shaw.

They find their way by the light of Leon’s phone. The bluish, sterile cast of the beam shows broken and rotting tracks, shows trash long forgotten, shows the occasional skittering rat.

“So," Leon asks as Shaw leans wheezing on the wall. "You come down here a lot?”

Shaw's only answer is a suppressed, shuddering laugh. She’s saving her energy.

It’s a long walk. You forget that, how many steps it can be between stops. Leon starts thinking about how deep under the earth they must be, how much weight is pressing down on top of them, how noisy it must be up there, how quiet it is down here. Just his breath and Shaw’s breath and their footsteps and the muffled rattle of a very distant train.

Then he starts thinking about how much unused space there is under the ground in this city, and how much cool stuff you could put in here. Like, you could totally get up to some urban hydroponic farming down here. That’s the kind of thing that gets you a flattering profile in the New York Times. The kind of thing people think is hot and interesting, but also responsible and thoughtful. Leon knows it’s a crock - the space is impossible to get and it’d make no money and he’s killed every aesthetically pleasing plant he’s ever owned - but the fantasy’s enough to keep panic at bay for the rest of his long walk.

After a while, the sound of their footsteps changes and the air seems cooler, wetter. He can feel the opening up ahead before he even sees it. “Shaw?”

Not fazed at all.“That’s the station,” she murmurs. “We can rest here.”

Leon lets the light from his phone play over the bricks strewn on the ground, the high ceilings, a phone booth set in the far wall, what looks like an honest-to-god cage in the corner.

Something went down in here.

When he turns to Shaw, the light reflects on her face, pale and sweaty and tired. “ _Should_ we be resting?” Leon asks. “Kinda seems like we should be getting you to a hospital, buddy.”

Shaw shakes her head. “It’s fine. Somebody’s coming.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“She told me she would send someone.”

“Oh. OK.” So she’s losing it. That’s not good. If Shaw doesn’t have it, Leon sure doesn’t. Leon never had it in the first place.

Shaw nudges him forward with a boot to the calf. “There’s a place back here where we can rest.”

That turns out to be truer than he expects it to be. Off the tracks, to the side, where maybe somebody’s old ticket-selling booth or back office used to be, there’s a bedroom. A freakishly regular-looking bedroom, like some trendy college girl's dorm room: bed, nightstand, chair, a funky little lamp that has long-since burnt out, a thick layer of dust over everything. There’s a stuffed animal that might be a bat on the bed, a gun sitting out on the nightstand next to a badly stained mug. Leon guides Shaw onto the bed, sits himself down on a floral, Anthropologie-looking pouf. He sits the light from the phone upright, fills the tiny room with its cold glow.

Shaw adjusts her position on the bed, clutching tight at the wound on her upper arm. “This was Root’s room,” she tells him.

Leon nods, hands her a pillow to brace her head against. “She’s, uh, the one you had a thing with?”

Shaw squints at him bitterly in the meager light.

“Fusco’s said some things that kinda only make sense if you two were dating or. Something.”

She nods, just barely, before letting her head flop onto the pillow.

Leon exhales, taps his feet nervously on the floor. “So your girlfriend just slept in an open-concept bedroom in the middle of an abandoned subway station, huh?”

“Yeah,” Shaw sighs. “She liked to be close by in case...something happened.” She closes her eyes, opens them again like it’s a real effort. “This was the place we moved to after the Library got raided.”

“Interesting choice," Leon says. He doesn't like the way dark blood is leaking around her hand. "And, uh. And what happened here?”

“It’s kinda hard to explain.” Her lips are dry, faintly gummy. Leon fishes a water bottle from his bag, makes her drink a little.

“Is it tough," Leon asks, "being back here again?”

She swipes the back of her hand over her mouth. “Not tougher than being shot.” She shuts her eyes again, seems to slip away for a moment. And then, so softly Leon can barely hear, she whispers, “I like to come back here sometimes.”

Leon can't imagine why. Memories, he guesses.

“M’ gonna go to sleep now,” Shaw mumbles.

Leon leans forward on the pouf, nearly slides off. “Is that a good idea?”

“Relax.” She takes a swipe at his arm, almost playfully. “I didn’t hit my head, I’m just bleeding out.”

“So that doesn’t make me feel...great about this.”

She seizes him by the front of his shirt. “Listen.”

He listens.

“You can’t carry me out of here,” she says. “You’re not gonna fix me on your own. You can’t get a signal down here. But _she_ said she’s sending someone, so someone’s going to come. There’s nothing else we can do right now. So I’m gonna get some sleep while I can.”

“But…”

Shaw releases him, falls slack on the bed.

“Who’s _she_?”

Shaw shuts her eyes like a wince.

“What am I supposed to do?”

“You’re the lookout, Leon," she says. Her voice is raw and thick. "Look out.”

And then she’s asleep.

 

* * *

 

Leon’s been happy to play the lookout a bunch of times in his life. The lookout doesn’t have to do much. The lookout doesn’t incur much risk. The lookout can pass the buck.

But Leon doesn’t like how pale Shaw looks. He doesn't like the blood on the front of his shirt where she grabbed him.

He rummages in the dark, searching for anything that can stop the bleeding. He finds an old band t-shirt in a drawer, finds duct tape and a serious, heavy-duty Maglite in a trunk under the bed. The Maglite batteries still have some juice in them, so he’s in business. He presses the light up against the water bottle and the room is flooded with clear, bluish light. Work, way back before any of this, made him go on a mandatory group camping experience and that was the only good trick that Leon learned there.

He’s pretty sure he’s supposed to disinfect Shaw’s angry-looking arm wound that’s leaking blood lazily onto the purple bedspread. But he doesn’t have anything to do that with, and he’d be uncomfortable using anything he found down here. So he does the best he can do. He crumples up the shirt and presses it tight against the wound until he can’t feel blood seeping through anymore. Then he wraps duct tape over it, around and around Shaw’s bicep. And that’s...it. Leon Tao has exhausted his medical knowledge.

_What now?_

He checks his phone first and finds that Shaw was definitely right about not being able to get a signal. But “call for help” is kind of the only trick left in Leon’s arsenal at this point. Maybe he could hike out? Maybe there’s an exit close by or a ladder he can climb so he can peek out a manhole or something. He saw stairs in the station, he’s pretty sure. Where do they go? Is it safe to climb them? Will it be safe to leave Shaw?

He stands, vacillating, in the bedroom door.

That’s when he hears the scuffle of shoes on rock.

“That’s a rat,” Leon tells himself, because he’d love for that to be a rat. A rat would be fine, normal, and expected. This is…

This sounds way too big to be a rat.

“That's a CHUD,” Leon tells himself, because his brain is sliding into the panic zone and maybe cheesy 80’s monster movies are real.

A light swings wide across the empty station from the far end of the tunnel, swiping in a meandering arc like a bad punch. “Hello?” calls a woman’s voice.

Leon wishes he was better informed as a lookout. Is this person dangerous? Is this person _she_? Should he shut up and hide or scream for help, like he really, desperately wants to?

“Is anyone down here?” she calls.

She doesn’t have an Albanian accent - not that Leon would know one if he heard one - and he is technically expecting someone, so: “Hey!” Leon turns the light from his phone towards where he thinks the flashlight beam came from. “We’re over here.”

The flashlight jolts in his direction, blinding him, and starts moving towards him, fast. He can hear her footsteps pounding on the subway floor. He’s wondering if maybe he should have taken that gun from the nightstand when the beam of light drops to the floor and woman jogs into the dim glow of his phone. She’s a brunette: youngish, sturdy, and capable-looking. Her hair is pulled back in a messy bun and she’s wearing a big NYU sweatshirt, jeans, and serious-looking boots. She’s panting slightly.

“Have we met?” she asks, shielding her eyes from the light of Leon's phone.

Leon shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”

“I didn’t think so either.” She sticks out a gloved, faintly grimy hand. “Dr. Tillman. Who am I here to help?”

He shakes her hand, finds that her grip is surprisingly strong, that her gloves are totally gnarly subway-exploring gloves. “Shaw's hurt,” he says.

“I don’t know who that is,” she answers, without skipping a beat.

 _Oh. Interesting. But she's a doctor, so..._ “This way.” He leads her towards the bedroom.

“I was told the patient was shot?” Dr. Tillman asks.

“Yeah. Upper arm. I’m not really...I don’t know anything. I patched her up as best I could, but. Come see.”

He scrambles in the dark, turns the full beam of the Maglite on Shaw's arm.

“Oh,” Dr. Tillman says. “Her.” She drops to her knees beside the bed, peering at the mass of duct tape that passes for a bandage. “Yeah, her I’ve met.”

“Cool,” Leon says, since he’s not sure what else to say. “She was, uh, she was talking and everything…”

Dr. Tillman’s taking off her subway-gloves, opening up her backpack, laying out first aid equipment on the bed. If she’s listening, she doesn’t show it. She pulls out a packet of wet wipes and starts scrubbing her hands. “You did this?" she asks. "With the duct tape?”

“Yeah, like I said, I don't know...”

She's barely listening, already locked into the task at hand. “OK. That’s not too bad.” She throws him another packet of wet wipes. “Scrub up, I’m gonna need help.”

Leon tears the packet open with his teeth, starts wiping at his hands. “Like I said, I don’t know anything about medicine or...”

She’s got gloves on already and she’s going to work on the duct tape with a pair of sharp-looking scissors. “Don’t worry about that," she says, voice smooth and completely calm. "I know lots of things.”

“OK.” He exhales. “OK, good.” His sleeves rolled up, his hands sufficiently clean, he kneels down beside Dr. Tillman, who is surveying Shaw’s bare, slightly-less-bloody wound with a critical eye.

“Oh, yeah,” she says under her breath. “That’ll stitch up fine.” She presses another plastic packet into his hands. “Gloves. Put ‘em on.”

“I have to ask,” Leon says, as his hands shake, as the gloves snap around his wrists. His voice feels way too loud for this room, for this whole situation. “Are you...are you the one in charge?”

He doesn’t expect her to snort like that when she laughs. “I had to climb down a manhole to get here,” she says. “No. No, I’m not in charge. Sometimes I get phone calls from a woman I've never met. She tells me where to go, I help whoever I find there, and then I leave. And a few days later, there's a little extra money in my bank account. I'm not in charge of anything.”

“Oh.”

She hands him a cotton pad, wet with alcohol. “Swab her wound, will you?”

Leon gets to swabbing.

Dr. Tillman’s business-like in a way he finds soothing. She gives small, simple orders, and all he has to do is carry them out. They sit there, the pair of them, in the dark, working on Shaw’s wound in companionable near silence.

When she starts stitching Shaw up and Leon gets overcome with a sudden queasiness and the silence is almost deafening, he says, “So, you also went to NYU?”

“What gave it away?” she answers, shooting a wry look down at her sweatshirt. “Yeah, I went. Were we there at the same time?”

“Don’t think so. I'm in accounting. I'm guessing you were medicine. I think I’m probably a lot older than you.”

She pulls a bit of a face. “I don’t know about that.”

“I turned 40 in February.”

Her eyebrows jump. “Would not have guessed that.”

“Well, I was an accountant in a past life. Not as stressful.”

“Guess not. So," she says, very carefully, "you do this full time, huh?”

“Yeah," Leon answers, a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. "Guess I do, now.”

“What’s that like? I’m not...I'm a consultant, I guess you'd say. I get called in about once a year. Most of the time, I'm an MD.”

“I mean, that probably pays better. And you can tell people about it.”

“Never thought about that. What do you tell people?”

Mostly, he doesn’t tell people anything. This whole thing has been kinda rough on his social life. Which isn’t the worst thing. Leon’s social life was like if you threw hours and hours of every day of your life into nurturing a plant you’re violently allergic to. If the plant was also sentient and actively trying to screw you over. Now he only has real conversations with two weirdos who he’s really, really starting to like, and all of his fake conversations happen with friendly strangers and are about dogs, which is a huge step up for Leon.

But when people do ask, he says: “I’m a forensic accountant for a small security firm.”

Dr. Tillman considers that for a minute. “Yeah, I guess I wouldn’t ask follow-up questions.”

“No one ever does.”

“Do you like doing this?” she asks.

“I liked the idea of it. I like the people I work with a lot. More than even I expected to. I have fun sometimes. A lot of the time. I like the idea of having fun and saving people’s lives and having that be what I do all day. But lately, it’s been getting kind of...real.”

“Like people getting shot?”

“Yeah,” Leon says. “Like that.”

Dr. Tillman peers at Shaw’s wound.

“And it’s not like I haven’t almost been murdered before,” Leon interjects. “Because I totally have, a bunch of times, and I was even getting used to it. And every other time it was because I was doing something self-serving,” _and fun_ , “and now it’s happening because I’m doing stuff to help other people, so that should feel better. Right?”

She nods, brow furrowed, but it’s hard to tell if she’s actually nodding at him.

“But now I’m just thinking: is this gonna be my life now? Is this every day? Like every time I almost died before, I changed what I was doing at least a little bit, but now I’m just gonna keep going forever, doing the right thing even if it means I’m gonna die? Is that what I’m doing?”

“Couldn’t tell you,” Dr. Tillman answers. “This is patched up, by the way.”

“Oh!” Leon scrambles to his feet. “So. So what now? Do we take her to a hospital or…?”

Dr. Tillman shakes her head. “In a perfect world. But she’s not a hospital kind of person. She’s stable, she’s about as comfortable as she can be. Focus on keeping an eye on her, keeping her hydrated, and she’s ready to go when she’s ready to go. That’s it.” With that, she stands, starts wiping her hands down with a fresh pack of wet wipes and getting her stuff in order.

“You’re not gonna stay?”

“Can’t do it,” she says, pushing gear into her backpack. “I’m about to be on call.”

“Oh.”

“You’ll be fine, though,” she says, with a smile. “You have everything you need.”

“I guess so,” Leon says, feeling distinctly un-fine. “Is she...is she gonna be OK?”

“She’ll live,” Dr. Tillman says, shouldering her pack. “If she's good about going to follow-up appointments, that arm might even be OK. You should tell her that; she might try to tough it out.”

"OK. I'll...I'll do that. Thanks. For helping out.”

“No problem,” she says. “And you’re not wrong to be worrying. She’s your friend.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess she is. Well, um, nice meeting you.”

“Nice meeting you too, Leon. And, listen, if you ever want to talk about NYU, or impromptu field surgery, or...any of this…”

Leon swallows hard. “I’d actually really like that.”

She has her gloves back on again, so he has to enter his number in her phone for her.

 

* * *

 

It’s a rough couple of hours, waiting for Shaw to wake up. The world narrows to a tiny bubble of light: this tiny bedroom, the distant rumble of trains, Shaw’s chest rising and falling. Leon spends a lot of time looking at his phone, urging it to find even a little bit of a signal so he can text Fusco for help or distract himself with Twitter or do literally anything other than sit there and watch to make sure Shaw keeps breathing. But it doesn’t, and his battery is getting low, so eventually he puts it back in his pocket.

He explores the bedroom: a weird mix of 14-year-old budding cybergoth and grizzled ex-mercenary. He examines the rubble of the Subway, tries to imagine what it was like when Finch and John and the gang were using it as a hideout, before whatever happened happened. He even ventures out far enough to check out the cage, which contains only a desk and a dusty computer.

In the end, he returns to the bedroom and paints his nails with an old bottle of black polish he digs out of the nightstand. Anything to keep occupied.

Leon’s blowing on his nails, praying for them to just dry already, when Shaw lets out a thin, miserable groan. He lurches to her side. “You OK? You in pain?”

Her dry lips part with a smack, her eyes open just a sliver. “I hate that smell.”

“What?”

“Nail polish.”

Leon feels a nervous smile creep over his face. “You want some water?”

She does.

 

* * *

 

 

Leon uses the last of his phone's battery when he climbs the steps of the subway and, in what looks and feels like a janitor's closet, fires off a desperate text to Fusco.

He shows up really fast. He doesn't need directions. 

"She OK?" he asks, strolling into the subway with absolutely zero fanfare, like that's a totally fine and reasonable place for him to be.

"Not really," Leon says, trying to keep up. "Like I said, she got shot."

Fusco furrows his brow like he's doing some quick, dangerous math. "Shot _where_ , though?"

"If you want me to die of a mortal gunshot wound," Shaw calls from inside the bedroom, "you're just gonna have to shoot me yourself." 

Fusco's face breaks into a grin. "What are you talking about?" he says to Leon. "She's great!"

Fusco's the kind of guy who's better suited to carrying a floppy, dying woman, so he volunteers for that job. He sits on the bed, drapes Shaw over his back piggypack style, and lifts her up onto his back while Leon tells him the whole story.

"Tillman was here?" Shaw says, like it's an update from a party and not her near death. "I haven't seen her in ages."

"She didn't know your name."

"She wouldn't," Shaw says. "She's like you. One of the ones they saved who pays it forward sometimes. Just less involved."

"Oh," Leon says as they walk up the steps. "She says you have to have a follow-up appointment for your arm."

"I'm a doctor and she's a wimp."

"You _went to medical school_ ," Fusco clarifies, "and she's a doctor. Don't try to be tough about this stuff."

Shaw groans, disgusted, and rests her head on Fusco's shoulder. 

They walk through what seems to be an academic building like that, Fusco carrying Shaw on his back, Leon trotting along beside them, and they only get stopped once (Fusco waves them off with a good-natured "She's hungover."). Outside, as they make their way toward Fusco's car, Leon asks, "So is this all ruined?"

"What?" Fusco asks.

"The...thing. The mission, or whatever."

Fusco furrows his brow, shrugs a little. "No. Nothing's ruined."

"But the Albanians..."

"That was always gonna be tricky, just because it's the mob. Caught a few key guys thanks to Shaw's work at their safehouse, though, so things are looking up."

"Yeah, but Shaw..."

"Got hurt. That happens sometimes." She starts to slip, and Fusco adjusts his grip. "You did a good job taking care of her."

Leon feels a chill down his back despite the heat. "Oh. And, uh, the Number? The kid? What happened there?"

"Took him to Connecticut. He has an aunt up there. Nice house. Seems like a nice lady too. Things will...well, they'll be different and that'll be hard. But that's how it is sometimes. Kid has my number, if things don't work out."

"So...so everything's fine?"

Fusco considers as he unlocks the car, pulls the door open. "Well, not fine, maybe. But everybody's better off than they were."

"Am I?"

He lowers her gently into the back of the car, lays her down across the seats. "Sure. You especially. You saved her life today."

Leon sits numb in the passenger seat, boiling hot and chilled to the bone and filled with warmth all at once.

In the back seat, Shaw stirs.

 

 


	7. Chapter 7

It's too hot to commit crime. That's Leon's take. 

Fusco pauses in wrestling with an AC unit to wobble his hand in the air noncommittally. "Some cops think that. Stats even back it up a little bit. But then there's other stats about how when it's stupid hot like this, people lose their tempers, step on each other's toes...you know. Piss off the wrong guy and..." The AC unit settles into place in the window with a jarring clunk. "...Well, you get yourself shot. Although I guess that's not premeditated, so we wouldn't hear about it."

Shaw clears her throat and Fusco falls silent, goes back to fiddling with the AC. She's opting not to help, but she's got an excuse: her arm's still in a sling. She'll be back to work soon, she claims, counting down the days to when her doctor predicted she could lose the sling like it's a concrete finish line. Shaw can't enjoy the break, she's too antsy. She's sitting still now, on a folding chair next to where Bear's sprawled on the cool floor. But there's a faint, flickering light in her eye.

"You're killing me, Leon," she says, peering over his shoulder at the screen. Her voice has a burr to it, like a bee under a jar. "There's gotta be something."

"You're the one who gets the Numbers, Shaw, not me."

She forgot, he thinks, for a second. Probably it was Finch's job before it was hers. She leans back in her chair with a groan, balances perilously on the two rear legs.

Leon floats his next ask delicately. "But since you ask..."

He feels like he's proposing a heist. That's the planning that went into this, the research, the hours spent scrolling through Yelp reviews and stalking foodie Instagram. 

"There's this restaurant not too far from here." He's aiming for casual, but Leon feels he sounds really fake. "Really good. Like, they're taking risks and doing a lot of farm-to-table stuff, but it's still really accessible. Great cocktails," he says, making intense eye contact with Shaw. "Totally reasonable non-alcoholic beverages," he adds, making equally intense eye contact with Fusco.

Fusco switches on the AC, fills the room with a low, persistent drone and a sudden gust of cold air. "I mean, I'll drink a seltzer," he murmurs in the brief silence that follows. "Nobody needs to get fancy about it."

" _The point is_ ," Leon pushes, "I was thinking we could all go out to eat together. You know. Like people."

Shaw and Fusco eye him curiously, like maybe they don't know. 

Fusco's the first to make an unsure, wobbly step away from anything that sounds like a commitment. "My kid..." he says, in the tone of someone who is very sorry about their bulletproof excuse to not socialize.

"Bring him," Leon interrupts. "Your kid's what, 14? He'll be fine. It's a restaurant, not a bar."

"It's a school night..."

"I'm texting you the menu," Leon says, digging his phone out of his pocket, thumb already darting across the screen.

Shaw makes her own move for the exit. "Bear needs..."

"Bring him too. They let you bring dogs. I checked." Leon leans back in his chair. "If anyone gives you trouble, just say he's a service dog. Your arm's in a sling; who's gonna argue?"

"It's not just that," Fusco's saying, "it's...I don't bring my kid to work stuff."

"You're really that worried about me meeting your kid?"

Fusco turns that one over in his mind for a moment. "Well, he met _you_ ," he says to Shaw, in a way that suggests that the damage has been done.

The two of them share a tense look.

"Is it that bad?" Leon asks. "Going out to dinner?"

Fusco hesitates before he says, "We just haven't done it for a long time. Not as a group like that."

"Never really did it ever," Shaw adds.

"Well, there was that picnic," Fusco says, "but that happened while you were gone."

Shaw folds her arms. "You people really busted ass looking for me, huh?"

"It wasn't like that."

" _Guys,_ " Leon snaps.

They pause, fix him with those curious stares yet again, like they're not sure quite what to make of him.

"I've been on my own for a while," Leon begins. "I'm not used to having backup. I'm not used to doing stuff for other people. All of this stuff is...is new." His throat is hot. He swallows. "And I just kinda thought...like, you already know each other really well because you've already saved each other's lives 500 times and you have all this shared stuff and I'm...new. I want to get to know you guys. In a regular way, not just in this weird way where we barely talk to each other until we both almost die and then we have some weird heart-to-heart. I get that this is kind of how things go here, but. I dunno. Maybe we could try a new thing. It was just a thought."

The Library falls silent except for the thrum of the air conditioner. Bear sits up, scratches industriously at his neck.

"I mean," Fusco says after a while, "what the hell, kid. I kinda wish somebody had taken me out to dinner at some point."

"I could eat," Shaw admits.

"Good," Leon says, turning back to the computer with an air of satisfaction. "'Cause our reservation's at 8."

 

* * *

 

Very few things seem to work out the way Leon planned them, but for whatever reason, this does. By 8, the swampy city air has settled, cooled, and their rooftop seating is totally bearable. Fusco's only a little late because he has to go pick up his son, and he turns out to be this sharp, funny kid who listens like an adult and looks like his dad only smaller and shinier. Bear begs a bowl of water and a tiny plate of chicken scraps off a waitress. Shaw reads the entire cocktail menu cover to cover before ordering a beer. 

The food is phenomenal, and Leon gets to keep his foodie cred, if nothing else.

His biggest worry was that there would be nothing to talk about. And the talk does come slow, at first. But Fusco's a guy who wants nothing more than to trade funny stories and brag about his kid. And he and Shaw are friends - real friends, not just coworkers who bitch about the new guy for fun - and he pries her out of her stoic shell a little, draws her out in a way Leon hasn't quite learned how to do yet. He laughs at Leon's jokes and bit-by-bit, he forgets to shove him away.

Shaw's not big on talking or laughing - she'll do both, but in a sparing, well-timed kind of way - but as dinner drags on, Leon watches the flickery, antsy light in her eyes calm to a golden, even glow.

Does Leon know them better? He's not exactly sure. They're both champions at talking in circles, at avoiding the big stuff. But he knows now what they look like when they're really relaxed, when they're not plotting or scheming or ready to kill. And they're good people, cool people, when they're like this. 

He knows now that he likes them as people. He's not sure what to do with that. He's just glad to have it confirmed.

Under the table, Bear snags scraps from these suckers.

The sky above them turns orange, then pink, then soft and dusty purple, before finally cooling to a warm, deep navy, and that's when Fusco takes his leave. "It really is a school night," he says apologetically, mussing his kid's hair. Then he leans into Leon. "You were right," he says, under the chatter in the restaurant. "About this. Not that things weren't good before, but we need this normal kind of thing. It's a good change." He claps Leon on the shoulder. "You got a good head on your shoulders, kid. It's weird, but I like it."

"It's just dinner, man."

"I know," he says. He gives Leon a hard squeeze, says his goodbyes.

Now he and Shaw are alone at the table, Bear curled between their feet. Leon feels a sudden sense of relief, a sudden spike of fear. Because there's something he needs to know, and he didn't think he could find it in him to ask with Fusco at the table. Now there's no reason not too, and he's very afraid. Brightly, Leon asks, "Another drink?"

Shaw downs her the last of her beer, all the way down to the last traces of foam. She eyes Leon suspiciously the whole time. "What's your angle?"

Heart pounding, he shrugs. "I'm buying."

So she'll have one more. And he will too. He'll need it.

"Since the tunnels," Leon says after their orders are in, "I've been wondering about my future in this."

Shaw blinks at him curiously. "What about it?"

"Well, like...whether I'm the right fit, I guess. For all this stuff."

 _All this stuff._ Not the best way to put it. Still, Shaw seems to give it some serious thought, sinking into her chair as she turns that idea over in her mind. "Not happy, Leon?" Her loose, faintly drunken gaze drifts to the view, to the infinite vista of deep blue shadow and twinkling yellow lights. "Working with us?"

"No." He's surprised by the forcefulness with which he says it, the certainty. He didn't realize before now. "No, I'm...I guess I am happy. I like working with you guys. I like all of this. I just feel like maybe...you guys don't like having me around. Some of the time, anyway."

Their drinks land on the table - Shaw's beer, Leon's sangria - and Shaw fills the moment of awkward silence with a faintly confused, mostly annoyed stare.

"Pretty sure Fusco can't stand me," Leon explains after the waiter is gone.

"Hm." Shaw takes a swig of her fresh beer. "Lionel likes you. He just doesn't like that we're getting a..." She makes a formless kind of gesture at Leon. "...An innocent involved."

Leon doesn't expect to be so offended. "Does he know what I used to do?"

"He knows. Lionel's barometer for innocence is all screwed up." She says it with so much warmth. 

"Maybe that's not really the problem," Leon says softly, staring into his red-purple, pulpy glass of sangria. "I don't like not knowing who I'm working for. For what I'm pretty sure are obvious reasons. The one time I didn't look into who I was working for hard enough, I ended up working for the worst people in the world. I don't want to do that again. If I'm gonna keep doing this, I need to know who's in charge."

"Better quit, then."

Leon looks up from his drink with a start.

"I'm serious," Shaw says. "If that's true, quit right now. I don't blame you; I get why you want to know so bad. She won't blame you either. If she knows you well enough to hire you for this, she knew you were the kind of person who would want to know. But you're not deep enough in this to know who's in charge yet. It's not a wait-and-see kind of thing." She runs her hands through her hair. "We don't work for any corporation, Leon. Not for any government. Not for any one person in particular. We don't push an agenda. We don't make any money. All this does is help people. That's it. That's what you're in for."

"And danger," he says. "We're in for danger too."

"Oh, yeah." Her eyes spark bright. "All the time."

Leon muses, "I guess I was always in danger anyway."

"Seems that way." 

"So it's not that different."

"I think it is," she says.

They drink together for a long moment.

 "The one in charge," Leon says after a little while. "She hired me. Not you."

Shaw squints into her beer. "Yeah."

"Did she say...do you know why?"

Rolling her shoulders back, Shaw says, "Hard to say. Probably she saw something about you. Smarts. Skills. That you're a good dude, generally. Something like that."

“Really? 'Cause I, uh. I kinda suck,” Leon admits, as much to himself as to Shaw.

Shaw takes a deep, thoughtful pull of her beer. She swallows. “Sure, a little bit.”

“I’m not a natural action guy,” Leon says, counting on his fingers. “I can't shoot guns. I can't throw a punch. I’m not great under pressure. Medically, I know nothing. I'm great at forensic accounting but all the other tech stuff is still kinda new to me. My focus isn’t great…”

“Funny.” Shaw tilts back in her chair. “In spite of you sucking and everything, I was just thinking about how you've been doing kinda well.”

“Yeah,” he says, softly. “I can plan a pretty good night out, anyway.”

She punches him on the upper arm, gentler than he expects. “That’s not what I meant.”

* * *

 

Their paths don't diverge right away when they leave the restaurant, so for a few blocks, they're stuck together, walking shoulder to shoulder, Bear trotting along between them. And Leon thinks they'll be able to get by with some kind of tough-guy superhero silence when Shaw, who has never broken a good companionable silence in her life, says, "So are you?"

"Am I...?"

"Quitting," she says. "'Cause if you are, I have to find somebody new to bring in. Change the locks. All that stuff."

"No," Leon says. "No, not yet. I like this job. And I like the people I work with. That hasn't happened for a while. I'm not gonna give up on this job just because I don't know everything about it. The mystery's part of what's keeping me interested."

"There you go, Leon," Shaw says. "Try to find the fun in it."

"Besides," he adds, "just because you won't tell me who the boss is doesn't mean I can't find out who they are on my own."

Shaw snorts. "I think I just figured out why she hired you."

Leon - slightly tipsy, very wired, brimming with purpose - comes in late the next morning with a weapons-grade hangover. But he does it in an eager, can-do kind of way, so he thinks he might be onto something.


End file.
